Reflections and memories from COVID-19 lockdown
I’ve been reflecting on the 5 year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic this week. I’ve already written from a work perspective, so these are my personal reflections.
The pandemic and the start of lockdown still feels very recent. I can vividly remember the last few days in our London office, the phone calls with our leadership team, and the speculation that we would need to decide to send everyone home.
It many ways, lockdown was a terrible time. It was scary and uncertain. I can remember the ambulances coming to our street at points over the following month and taking away neighbours. Tragically, some of the most elderly and vulnerable never returned home. While there was plenty of community spirit and organising – the WhatsApp and Facebook groups, the clapping for the NHS workers – no one quite knew how to respond to the virus, and we were all guessing at the best ways to keep our loved ones safe. One of my strongest memories from the first weeks of lockdown is spraying down each of our online shopping deliveries with disinfectant.
On a personal level, lockdown did make me stop. I stopped travelling all over the UK for the first time in probably 15 years. I was deeply tired and I didn’t really realise how much until lockdown acted like a forced reset.
Despite the trauma, uncertainty, and strangeness of the situation, I suddenly saw a lot more of my family – we were all living on top of each other 24-hours a day. Despite continuing work and the switch to back-to-back video calls, I was fortunate to not be directly part of any front-line responses within government and health services. I was busy, supporting our people and projects (then FutureGov), but busy in a distracted way that also allowed more time with my family who were having to adjust to home schooling, and my wife Rebecca to being on furlough from work.
I remember the daily walks really well. When lockdown officially happened, a few days later than we had shut our London office, we had the UK government rules of one hours exercise a day. My biggest memory of lockdown was the weather. It was hot… we had what felt like months of sunshine. Every evening after work, and as the nights got lighter towards and beyond Easter, I would head out to wander and breathe the fresh air with my children – my son was not quite 2 years old at the time, and my eldest daughter had only just started secondary school.
Over the coming 6 months we walked the deserted streets of the town we live in, Kendal – discovering things that had always been there, but that we’d never noticed before – the lanes, cycle tracks, fields, and local allotments were all explored again and again. Something I now feel deeply is that I will always know my town, it’s hidden streets, alleyways and history better because of 2020.
Sometimes something has to change in order for us to see things differently. The pandemic helped me see my family, my life, and the place I live differently. To reconnect. I struggle to frame this all as a positive because of the circumstances and terrible impact covid had on so many people’s lives, but I can see how this dark time began to shape a new personal chapter through my own experiences.
There were many brighter moments in the coming months following March 2020. I remember camping with the kids in our small garden for my birthday in May. We woke up cold at 5am and moved inside before I made everyone bacon sandwiches. I also remember the joy of being able to order a Thai takeaway to celebrate the next day. This was one of our first real contacts with the outside world – taking our first small steps into normal life again. It was the best takeaway I’ve ever had.
Finally, there was then the gradual resetting and reconnecting beyond immediate family over the next 18 months… being able to see friends and extended family again (outdoors at first). There were the UK holidays, some that happened like Cornwall in Summer 2020, and the last minute cancelation of the same trip the following year because of the need for our family to self-isolate for 10 days.
We eventually reached points of schools reopening, shutting, and then opening again, before I was able to begin to travel, work and connect with people in person again. In the time since, work has returned to a new type of normal. It’s never been quite the same. It’s more remote and flexible in good ways, but also to the point that I have weeks where I miss the previous amounts of time I had with people in real life.
Reflecting 5 years on I feel sadness but also recognise the joy of living life, especially with all that’s followed in the time since. I know this isn’t how everyone will feel, and I also feel lucky that our immediate family wasn’t impacted more severely by the pandemic. There is still shock and uncertainty in reliving those initial moments, but I want to remember all the many small moments when the light the shone through the cracks of such a dark time.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.